LANDMARKS: There's some eye-popping new architecture springing up around the country. Gemma Tipton offers a drive-by guide to Ireland's most stare-worthy structures
As I sat bored in the car, managing to maintain a low-grade, yet incessant, bickering with my brother, Mum and Dad would search for sights out of the windows. "Look, it's Historic Ferns!" they would yell from the front. "Stop squabbling, you'll miss Jerpoint Abbey" or "See, there's Kilkenny Castle, built on the site of a wooden tower first erected in 1172 "
Summer journeys in the car were punctuated then with castles and churches, monasteries and abbeys, and the Ireland they revealed was an old country, a place almost held back by its history.
A tour around new Ireland still shows you the churches and castles, of course. But lately there have been some additions. While your car journeys will take more time than they once did, clogged up in the sprawling suburbs, they will also offer some rather intriguing highlights, and not all of them ones you'd traditionally associate with the guide books. All built since the year 2000, here are (just a few of) my favourite roadside attractions.
• In Dublin, as you head west along the quays, one of the first "sights" you'll pass is Santiago Calatrava's James Joyce bridge over the Liffey, at Blackhall Place. Calatrava has created some jaw-dropping buildings and bridges, most notably at the Milwaukee Art Museum in America, and he has hit the headlines for his quite wonderful drawings for the new subway station at the World Trade Center site. He hasn't really done anything special with this bridge though, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that it looks like a design that could have been left over from somewhere else
No, for a really worthwhile bridge experience, head north to the new Boyne Bridge, designed not by an architect, but by the same Sandyford-based firm of engineers, Roughan and O'Donovan, who worked with Calatrava on his Liffey bridge.
There's something really romantic about bridges; they produce in me a sense of dreamy wonder that even the statistics for the Boyne Bridge can't dispel (it is, by the way, an asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge, 370 metres long, with a 35-metre wide deck comprising two longitudinal steel plate girders with transverse girders at 3.333 metres centre). If you're not heading that way for a while though, the Boyne Bridge has a little sister, the Taney Luas Bridge in Dundrum.
• Staying in the Boyne area, however, that structure you can see which seems part pagoda and part pavilion is the Dundalk Racing Stadium. It officially opened this month and was designed by Belfast/Derry firm, Hamilton Architects.
From my one experience going greyhound racing (in a windswept arena somewhere in the North of England), the things you're primarily looking for at a dog track are shelter and a good view. Oh, and a nice bar, with access to the betting as well. With its 60-metre window, wrapping around the front and sides, the Dundalk Stadium easily supplies these as well as (uniquely in these islands) the facility for four-bend 670-yard races, and two-bend 410-yard races. Apparently, this is very significant, and so is probably well worth celebrating, along with the 75th birthday of the Dundalk International race (prize fund €35,000), next July.
• Back in Dublin, the building to have achieved joint-first status on my "What is That?" list is the copper-green, glass and concrete thing on the roadside in Clontarf. It's like a broken-up pyramid, sliced and put back together by a drunken pharaoh. Or perhaps it was assembled from triangles, in a mad geometrist's dream. Either way, I love it. It's also a waste water pumping station.
Apparently, the decade between 1896 and 1906 was "the Golden Age of Drainage Works" in Dublin. Well, if that's the case, then this building signals that we are now entering something of a sewage Renaissance, prefigured perhaps by the Japanese-style West Pier Pumping Station (best seen from the Dart) between Dún Laoghaire and Seapoint. Architect Tom de Paor has created a building that actually makes waste water seem fascinating. And if you think it will never make the guide books, it is worth considering that the rather beautiful refuse incinerator at Spittelau, decorated by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, is now a prime Viennese tourist attraction.
• The joint-winner of "What is That?" (a game that can halt back-seat bickering for at least 10 minutes) is also green and geometrically-interesting. Murray O'Laoire's Learning Resource Centre for the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology sits above the Dublin Road on the way into Galway. The copper verdigris sails are functional as well as stunning, as they shield direct sunlight from those studying in the libraries behind. Striking, uncompromising, ambitious buildings can fight with their environments, but when the architects get it right, they don't so much blend in, as look as if they were exactly what the landscape had been waiting for.
Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim is an example of this. Ignoring the fact that the interior seems to exist only to exhibit itself, the Bilbao Guggenheim looks as if had arrived in order to complete the riverfront setting, and it's the same here with the GMIT building.
All of our most significant buildings from history were designed to reflect the ambitions of those who had commissioned them, as well as to be landmarks for the locality. But somehow we became stuck in a period of anti-modern reluctance, where any new building (on a major scale) would be initially rejected for being monolithic, unsympathetic, or whatever other pejorative terms best suited their detractors. This new GMIT building finally signals a way out of that petty petulance, with an utterly modern building that it is so easy to fall in love with.
• Also on the approach road to Galway is the brand new Galway Clinic. The clinic is the offspring of Dublin's Blackrock Clinic, same developer (surgeon, James Sheehan), same architects (Dublin's Campbell Conroy Hickey), and like the Blackrock, is one of those beautiful, sleek hospitals where you feel you could only go if you had a particularly attractive ailment, although the clinic themselves say that they will be "removing the perception of exclusivity without compromising the delivery of medical excellence "
In terms of space, it is slightly larger than its Blackrock parent (19,000 square metres), while, architecturally speaking, it seems to have been created from a mating between Richard Meier's neoclassical Getty Center (with its pristine and perfect pavilions) and an airport terminal building.
Formally, the architecture isn't innovative (although the medical equipment inside is bound to be with its five state-of-the-art operating theatres, two day-surgery theatres, eight-bed intensive care unit, endoscopic rooms, oncology treatment areas, therapeutic radiotherapy ), but this medical citadel has been successfully designed to reassure those arriving that they are in safe and expert hands.
• Taking the Charleville road into Tullamore, Áras an Chontae sits between suburbia and the town. If the ABK (Ahrends, Burton and Koralek) building is ahead of its context (standing out against the smaller scale of the nearby houses), it is also one of a new breed of county council offices that has shaken off the "occupy-the-old-courthouse" mentality, instead leading by example in terms of planning and design. Áras an Chontae is a light-filled space, clad with wooden screens which both shield those inside from the "greenhouse effect" and tones down that glass-and-concrete thing that can make new edifices so off-putting.
Inside, architectural trainspotters (such as myself, I'm afraid) can see ABK's "signature" staircase (it turns up in their Berkeley Library in Trinity, at the Dublin Dental Hospital, the Maidenhead Library, and at the Techniquest Science Centre in Cardiff Bay). Interestingly, Áras an Chontae is built over a subterranean cold water lake, and miraculous heat exchangers, the firstof these to be used in Ireland, somehow manage to use this resource both to cool the building in summer, and warm it in winter.
• More of a roadside attraction for those desperately circling Ennis town centre in search of a parking space, than a building you'll spot on your way to somewhere else, glór is Gilroy McMahon's centre for Irish music (although it will get its own road soon). Building a contemporary space for a traditional and well-loved art form is a tricky one. After all, most people love to experience traditional Irish music in traditional Irish pubs (with or without the smoke). But as a contemporary building is unlikely to include saggy seats, bottlenecks by the bar, and dodgy toilets, how do you go about designing a space to mingle intimacy with larger areas, to balance the need for increasingly complicated technical services with the creation of that all-important (and elusive) atmosphere?
Glór's cut-stone and plate-glass exterior tells you immediately that it's going to have a stab at this juggling act. Architect Des McMahon says his aspiration was to create a building that was an "instrument of music in itself", and while it is true that the building in which you listen to music can be a vital part of the experience, sometimes the music itself is so good, you can quite forget where you are
• In Northern Ireland, the National Lottery has had an enormous impact on buildings for the arts, funding extensions and new-builds all over the place. Some of these, it has to be said, are less successful than others, and there is always a temptation with an arts centre to go wild with the architecture. New spaces often seem to forget that simple plain places are often the best for quietly enjoying art.
In fact, all over Ireland we have arts buildings where architects have confused the ideas of access and transparency with a belief that plate-glass windows, with light flooding in, create the best places for spending time with works that are often delicate, and may well be light-sensitive (remember ArtHouse?).
In Armagh, architects Glenn Howells have got it pretty much right with the Market Place. The Market Place is modern (in the Modernist sense), and manages that rare feat for a multi-use arts centre, which is to give the gallery a proper space of its own, not just shoving it in the bar, or on the way to the toilets. The Market Place also shows how contemporary buildings can sit in historic settings, without aggressively stamping all over their neighbours. This is a roadside attraction that's well worth getting out of the car for.
Most of these buildings have won awards, and with the exception of the Market Place, all were designed by architects based in Ireland. That's quite an amazing thing, if you consider how all-over-the-place we were with architecture, say 20 years ago, when any new building that wasn't watered down with a faux-Georgian façade was greeted with horror and derision. At last we are beginning to define what we think and feel about contemporary architecture, and in the process we are creating an architecture of our own, one that suits us, and one that (like us) can be fun as well as functional. The styles of the various buildings I've described are too eclectic to announce that we have a new architectural tradition. Perhaps if there is a linking theme, it is the way that the most successful of these buildings relate their materials and shape to their settings, but then, that's what all good buildings really have to do.